Duke University Chapel is one of the great places in U.S. campus religious life. It is more cathedral than chapel, its gothic spires soaring high into the clear North Carolina air. Look closely, and you'll notice that the carvings outside the cathedral doors are not medieval saints but Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and Southern poet Sidney Lanier. John Wesley, with early Methodist Bishops Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke, also appears in the stone, as does 18th century revivalist George Whitfield, along with such heroes to Protestants as Martin Luther, John Wycliffe, and Girolamo Savonarola. On the lawn is a statue to Duke University's founding philanthropist, tobacco mogul James Buchanan Duke, unsurprisingly clasping a cigar.
Architecturally the chapel is simultaneously a Christian church, shrine to southern culture, celebration of America, ode to Methodism, and champion of Protestantism. Former First Things editor Jody Bottum, a Catholic, once commented that Duke's campus was maybe one of the last locales where the old Mainline Protestant ascendancy can still be felt.
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